Thursday 25 July 2013

A Thursday Special - Platform 2B Foundations

Fun and games today as we tackled the tricky task of digging out the Platform 2B foundations along side/in place of the  old side drain. This required part of the old side drain to be removed in order to get to solid ground for the new foundation. This involved using a pecker (Jo asked me not to make jokes about keeping our pecker up) on a 360 excavator whilst using the the JCB to retrieve the resultant spoil and pull a trench to the correct line and depth.

Here the pecker in action.









It then got horribly complicated as we brought two dumpers and the JCB into action. The large Thwaite dumper was taking the main spoil down to the car park and the small dumper was placing good ballast behind platform 2.

In between times, whilst the dumper was on a long run to the car park, Steve, Graham (Morrrison) and Peter Quick, retrieved some more blocks from farther north, ready for block laying on Saturday.









Eventually, by 5 pm the trench was completed to its full length, ie the same length as 1B.

I take my hat off to the team who stuck to the job all day and left it ready for concrete tomorrow.





John C up to his arm pits in it...


Here a few odd pics that tell the tale:-












Jo takes a breather...














Ballast to go behind platform 2















Finally Constain came to carry out a site visit to review the logistics of off loading the Mythe bricks. No problems were anticipated. I was surprise that they thought 8 loads would do it ... a subsequent conversation in the afternoon concluded that they had miss calculated and it would be 40 loads.   mmm that will be interesting!

3 comments:

HowardGWR said...

Great coverage and hats off to you all. Chapeau in fact!

Toddington Ted said...

Hear! Hear! A tremendous effort once more. Good to know that you will be getting more bricks soon, I guess you'll need them!

richard said...

Ooooooooooooo 40 loads that'll keep those dedicated brick cleaners busy for a day or two